Rwanda-Congo: The War of Narratives

The original French version of this essay was published on Afrique XXI, August 21, 2024.

Analysis: As fighting rages in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the regimes in Kinshasa and Kigali are engaged in an information war that gives pride of place to myth and intoxication. Rwanda can count on its digital army on social networks, and the DRC on a few influencers, starting with conspiracy essayist Charles Onana.

In her reflection on war photography, Regarding the Pain of Others (Picador, 2003), critic Susan Sontag writes that images of atrocities do not necessarily provoke empathy. They can evoke “a call for peace. A cry for vengeance. Or simply a stunned awareness, continually refueled by photographic information, that terrible things are happening.”

The conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo raises another possibility: that these photos will simply never be taken. Yes, there are 7 million people displaced by violence–the third-highest total in the world after Sudan and Syria, according to the UN–but it is presented as too complex, with dozens of armed groups fighting for a myriad of reasons, often very local. For many in the West, it is also “too African,” too peripheral to the interests of the superpowers. This leads to some sobering statistics: over the past year, the US daily The New York Times published 53 articles on the Congo, compared with 3,278 on the Ukraine. The conflict in this Central African country was not the subject of a single story on Fox News.

For those affected by the violence, the images are of course etched in their memories. Sontag, writing in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, feared that images of violence do not unite, but divide; that they do not arouse disgust at war, but a desire for revenge. The contradictory narratives surrounding the Congolese conflict, instrumentalized by demagogues, illustrate his point. These narratives, often seen as propaganda or conspiracies spread by outsiders, shape decision-making and violence on the ground.

“We’re Ready to Fight”

On the Congolese side, a popular shortcut is to blame Rwanda for the violence in the east. As President Félix Tshisekedi recently declared, “One thing is responsible for this situation, and that is Rwandan aggression.” During the 2023 election campaign, at the end of which he was re-elected, he launched into a public diatribe: “I want to address Rwandan President Paul Kagame, to tell him this: since he wanted to behave like Adolf Hitler by having expansionist aims, I promise him that he will end up like Hitler.”

Similar hyperbole can be found across the border in Rwanda. President Paul Kagame accuses his counterpart of propagating the ideology of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis (which left 1 million dead in three months) and claims that the M23, an armed group composed mainly of Congolese Tutsis, is simply fighting to protect its community. Although Kagame has denied supporting the M23 (though this has been confirmed by several United Nations (UN) investigations, including this one), he has also made it clear that he doesn’t need anyone’s permission to send troops across the border to protect his fellow citizens from Rwandan rebels peddling the ideology of genocide. “We are ready to fight,” he told the press, “we are not afraid of anything.”

It’s easy to find fault with both accounts. Kagame can’t be held responsible for all the overlapping and interlocking conflicts in his neighbor, but, on the other hand, it’s dishonest to assert that Rwandan rebels in Congo, which include fugitive genocidaires who formed the bulk of the leadership of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) in 2000, still pose an imminent threat to Rwanda. And yet, these stories work because they strike a chord.

A War Of Narratives

They resonate deeply in both countries, as the war is not only taking place on the battlefield, but also on social networks and in the collective consciousness. The Cardinal of Kinshasa, Fridolin Ambongo, accused Rwanda of “expansionist ambitions” and “systematic plundering” of Congolese resources. Singer Fally Ipupa, one of the DRC’s biggest stars, declared he would no longer perform in Rwanda. Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege, winner of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize, called on Western donors to sanction Rwanda. In a survey carried out in 2022, 77% of Congolese questioned felt that Rwanda was responsible for the conflict in their country.

As for Rwanda, it’s clear that the ruling party feels unjustly accused. “Rwanda will never hesitate or apologize for protecting the security of its people,” declared Paul Kagame. While it is difficult to gauge popular opinion in such an authoritarian country – and while the government often disseminates its views through a digital army on social networks – many Rwandans, especially older ones, fear that the ethnic divisions of the past will be rekindled and that the spark will come from the eastern DRC. Thirty years after the genocide, no less than 25% of the population—and even more among the survivors of the genocide against the Tutsis—suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Congolese resentment of Rwanda has deep roots. In 1994, during the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda, 1 million refugees crossed the border into the DRC (then Zaire). Among them were elements of the Rwandan army defeated by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), as well as infamous militias such as the Interahamwe (made up of civilians), responsible for the massacres during the genocide. Two years later, in 1996, the new Rwandan government, led by Paul Kagame (re-elected for a fourth term on July 15, 2024 with over 99% of the votes cast), took the lead in a coalition of neighboring countries which, together with a coalition of Congolese rebels, the Alliance des forces démocratiques pour la libération du Congo (AFDL), dismantled the refugee camps and put an end to Mobutu Sese Seko’s thirty-two-year reign.

This coalition was followed by a series of Rwandan-backed insurgencies: the RCD, the CNDP and, more recently, the M23. Each of these rebellions has drawn on Congolese Hutu and Tutsi communities, and each has engaged in widespread human rights violations, often with the declared aim of defending these communities. These abuses, alongside the humiliation of suffering repeated foreign invasions, have left deep scars. Real material interests help to fuel these rebellions, such as the exploitation of mineral resources, but the violence has also been fuelled by narratives with a strong dose of demagogy and historical revisionism.

The Conspiracy Theories of Charles Onana

One of the protagonists of this revisionism is Charles Onana, a prolific Franco-Cameroonian writer. Through his small Paris-based publishing house, Duboiris, he has published twenty-six books, at a rate of more than one a year for two decades. Despite their disparate quality and dubious rigor, he managed to attract considerable support. One of his books, Ces tueurs tutsi au cœur de la tragédie congolaise (2009), was prefaced by US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. Another, Côte d’Ivoire: the coup d’état (2011), by former South African president Thabo Mbeki. His latest book, Holocauste au Congo. L’omerta de la communauté internationale (L’Artilleur, 2023), is presented by Jacques Chirac’s former French Minister of Defense (1995-1997), Charles Millon.

Onana’s popularity has risen in the DRC in recent years by surfing on the latest Rwanda-backed M23 offensive, which began in November 2021. In March 2024, he was invited as a guest of honor by the Congolese government, welcomed by a police fanfare and the deployment of a heavily armed military guard, for a series of lectures at public universities and Parliament. His latest book can be found everywhere in Kinshasa, on parliamentary desks and in bookshops that are not very well stocked. Posters with enlarged versions of his book cover can also be seen at certain events organized by Congolese in the diaspora.

Few serious academics consider this latest book to be a solid scientific work. Like many conspiratorial thinkers, Onana passes off speculation, innuendo and lies as scientific conclusions, with elaborate footnotes and references to documents from US and French government archives. But rarely do these sources actually back up his claims.

Given the complexity of the Congolese conflict, Onana’s greatest rhetorical asset is perhaps his simplicity. According to him, the Congolese crisis has been orchestrated from the outset by the Rwandan government, which is itself in the service of the United States, members of the French elite and multinational corporations. Since 1990, when Kagame’s RPF launched its offensive on Rwanda from Uganda, “the main idea was to install at the head of Rwanda a leader capable of invading Congo-Zaire and seizing its wealth for the benefit of Western mining companies and Anglo-American private interests supported by certain Western leaders”, he writes. The result, according to him: 10 million Congolese killed, half a million women raped, millions of tons of minerals looted and 110,000 square kilometers of forest destroyed. These figures were echoed by the Congolese president himself in an interview with the French daily Le Monde in March 2024: “In the Congo, there have been 10 million deaths,” he asserted. 

Onana is in the right ballpark, but lacks nuance and rigor. Several mortality studies and statistical analyses suggest that the number of deaths due to the humanitarian consequences of conflict runs into the millions. Direct killings are probably far less numerous, even if they number in the hundreds of thousands. It is also likely that tens of thousands of women have been raped by armed groups, although data on this is scarce.

The Tutsi Genocide: A “Swindle”

Onana is no stranger to hyperbole and distortion. He has argued that “the theory that a Hutu regime planned the ‘genocide’ [sic] in Rwanda is one of the greatest swindles of the twentieth century.” His version of events in Rwanda has been contested in France: he was indicted in 2022 for public denial of the existence of a crime against humanity. In October 2019, on the LCI news channel, the author had declared that, “between 1990 and 1994, there [had been] no genocide against the Tutsis, nor against anyone else.”

His most recent writings extend these theories to the wars in the DRC. Here’s the condensed version of his argument: the plan of Kagame’s RPF rebels was from the outset to drive a large part of the Rwandan population to flee to the Congo, as this would provide him—and his US allies and industrialists—with a good excuse to invade Zaire, overthrow Mobutu and pillage Congolese minerals.

Like any good conspiracy, it’s hard to refute some of the elements put forward, even if the author provides little evidence. He mixes well-known facts with half-truths and lies. In 1994, some 1.3 million Rwandan refugees did indeed flee to the DRC (many more fled to Tanzania). But was this part of a plot to alter Rwandan demographics in favor of the Tutsis, and a ploy to create a pretext for invading Zaire? Despite the documents he cites, he lacks proof. And circumstantial evidence suggests otherwise: in 1996, when the new Rwandan army (controlled by Kagame) invaded Zaire, the vast majority of refugees returned home to Rwanda. Those from neighboring Tanzania eventually did too. If the aim was to radically alter Rwanda’s ethnic proportions, it didn’t work.

Washington’s Blindness and the Myth of “Tutsiland”

With regard to the role of the United States, the Clinton administration, which felt guilty for having played a decisive role in the withdrawal of peacekeepers during the genocide, showed understanding towards the new RPF government. It provided humanitarian support and helped set up a campaign to persuade refugees to return home, created a demining program and, most controversially, trained Rwandan officers in counter-insurgency.

This policy was short-sighted. Support for the new regime and empathy for the traumas suffered by Rwandan society blinded Washington’s policy, leading it to turn a blind eye or ignore reports of massacres committed by the new Rwandan authorities and the RPF inside the country and in Zaire (renamed DRC in 1997). The words of the US defense attaché in Kigali at the time, Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Odom, commenting on a massacre of displaced persons in Kibeho, Rwanda, in 1995, are revealing: “The deaths were tragic… Compared to the 800,000 deaths of the genocide, the 2,500 deaths were a mere speed bump.” Nevertheless, the evidence for a preconceived, U.S.-backed master plan to plunder Congolese resources, as Onana asserts, is weak.

In the second part of his book, ethnicity occupies a prominent and troubling place. According to Onana, since the 1980s, Kagame and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni have been intent on creating a “Tutsi-Hima empire” stretching from Uganda to Rwanda, Burundi and the DRC. The aim of this “Tutsiland”, as he calls it, would be to enable the Anglo-Saxon powers to exert influence over the whole of Africa. Their tentacles would be far-reaching: “A powerful Anglo-Saxon lobby has been working on this issue for years, with close links to the office of the UN Secretary-General, other UN agencies, Germany, the US Congress, Great Britain and the office of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) [renamed the African Union in 2002, editor’s note],” writes the Franco-Cameroonian author.

He also suggests that Kagame has used women to win the trust of heads of state in Congo-Brazzaville, the Central African Republic and elsewhere. The roots of this stereotype are reminiscent of genocidal propaganda: Tutsi women were often portrayed as a fifth column, an intimate enemy, always seeking to defend their “race” by devious means. Examples can be found in Kangura, the publication that disseminated hate messages in the run-up to the genocide. A February 1994 cartoon, for example, suggests that Roméo Dallaire, general of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (Minuar), chose the RPF camp because he was seduced by a Tutsi woman.

“They’re All The Same”

Reminders of this rhetoric remain omnipresent in the Congo. In 2023, former minister Justin Bitakwira, an ally of the Congolese president, declared in an interview: “A Tutsi is a born criminal. They’re all the same. When you see a Tutsi, you see a criminal. When they’re in a position of weakness, they can sleep in your bed for six months. And when they come to power, they deny ever having known you. I’ve never seen such a wicked race.” Boketshu Wayambo, a popular diaspora influencer, posted a video on YouTube in which he proclaims, “Brothers in Kinshasa, you should target the Rwandans, all the Tutsis who are in Kinshasa…. They are turning God’s earth into Tutsiland!” Two local academics have compiled a list of twenty-seven YouTube broadcasts containing similar rhetoric and viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

Ironically, despite the nationalist references invoked by these demagogues, these obsessions have a clearly colonial origin. European settlers in this region, inspired by the racial theories in vogue in the US and Europe at the time, were influenced by the “Hamitic hypothesis”—from the biblical name of Ham, who dishonored his father, Noah, and was cursed for being the “servant of servants”—according to which any sign of sophistication in African architecture, culture or politics must necessarily be of foreign origin, brought by the descendants of Middle Eastern peoples in Africa.

In 1902, a French Catholic prelate said of the Tutsis: “Their intelligent and delicate appearance, their love of money, their ability to adapt to all situations seem to indicate a Semitic origin.“ In 1948, a Belgian cleric described the Hutus as “the most common type of blacks, brachycephalic and prognathic, with agronomic taste and aptitudes, sociable and jovial […] with thick lips and a squashed nose, but so good, so simple, so loyal.”

These stories have a real impact. For example, Onana regurgitates, in pseudo-scientific language, the lie that Congolese Tutsis from South Kivu province, where they are called Banyamulenge, are recent immigrants and therefore have no right to citizenship—and therefore land—in Congo. He claims that all the wars that have broken out in eastern DRC since the fall of President Mobutu have been fuelled by the “spurious” claims of the Banyamulenge.

The Bogeyman Rwanda Needed

In so doing, Onana conveniently overlooks the many sources drawn from oral histories and colonial documents which show that this community has lived in the highlands of South Kivu since at least the nineteenth century, and probably earlier. Here again, Onana’s confabulations are not insignificant: Martin Fayulu, a Congolese opposition leader, has made the denial of Banyamulenge identity a campaign argument; MP Muhindo Nzangi, who later became Minister of Education, made similar statements in 2020; and armed groups in South Kivu province are constantly calling for the expulsion of all Banyamulenge from Congo.

According to Charles Onana, Congolese institutions have been systematically infiltrated by Tutsis. In a speech at Kinshasa University on March 17, 2024, he called on the government to track down and root out these “traitors.” Referring to the numerous reports (notably from the UN) that the Congolese army is responsible for widespread abuses in the ongoing conflict, he wrote: “It is not Congolese military [officers] who are committing the crimes mentioned in these reports, but Rwandan and Burundian mercenaries and Banyamulenge militiamen integrated into this army. Within the FARDC, they are doing exactly what they have always done as militiamen or mercenaries in their respective ‘rebellions.'” Needless to say, this is absurd: there is ample evidence that Congolese soldiers from other communities have also been guilty of numerous abuses.

Perversely, Onana could well be the bogeyman Rwanda needed. For their part, the Rwandan leaders present their own equally deceptive history to justify their actions. There is no example like Onana’s to spread their version of events. Power in Kigali is organized differently, with little room for independent voices. It is the government itself, through its affiliated media and online supporters, that fuels debate.

President Paul Kagame, who came to power in 2000 after serving as Vice-President and Minister of Defense from 1994 onwards, linked the current situation in the DRC to the Tutsi genocide during the thirtieth commemorations of the genocide in April 2024. Highlighting the crescendo of hate speech against Congolese members of the Tutsi community, he declared: “The perpetrators of the genocide are not the only ones to have committed acts of genocide. The perpetrators of the genocide in Rwanda, who fled in 1994, have since collaborated with the governments of the DRC. And what they are doing today is akin to genocide.” His government claims that the FDLR are integrated into the Congolese army with the aim of returning to Rwanda and continuing their genocidal project.

A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Onana is a favorite target of the Rwandan government, particularly its digital army, hyperactive on social networks. Kigali accuses him of minimizing or denying the 1994 genocide and stirring up hatred against the Tutsi community. A government-linked site calls his book a “bible of hatred”, while a similar account on X (formerly Twitter) says it has become “the totem of these [anti-Rwanda] demonstrations, from Paris to Brussels, from Goma to Kinshasa.”

Parts of the Rwandan story are accurate. The Congolese army has a long history of collaboration with the FDLR, including in recent years. And there is no doubt that the Congolese Tutsi community suffers discrimination and persecution. The problem is that the Rwandan authorities have got the sequence wrong: none of these factors seem to have prompted their recent support for the M23. On the contrary, the Rwandan military intervention has been a self-fulfilling prophecy, aggravating anti-Tutsi sentiment and rekindling collaboration between the Congolese army and the FDLR.

It’s worth going back to January 2019, when Félix Tshisekedi came to power. After his inauguration, he sought to intensify collaboration with Rwanda. He visited Kigali and laid a wreath at the Gisenyi genocide memorial, a first for a Congolese leader. Kagame reciprocated a few months later by attending the funeral of Tshisekedi’s father in Kinshasa, to the applause of the crowd in the national stadium. The Congolese head of state then continued his predecessor’s policy of allowing Rwandan troops to deploy in eastern DRC and conduct targeted operations, often alongside Congolese troops, against Rwandan rebels. In September 2019, they killed FDLR leader General Sylvestre Mudacumura. A few months later, they eliminated Laurent Ndagijimana, the leader of a dissident FDLR faction, the Conseil national pour le renouveau de la démocratie (CNRD).

Brief Honeymoon

This military collaboration lasted until the early months of 2021. In June of that year, Tshisekedi visited Kagame in Rwanda. They signed several agreements, including one giving a company close to the RPF the right to refine gold from a major Congolese state-owned gold mining company. In November 2021, Kagame met his counterpart again in Kinshasa—on the sidelines of a conference on positive masculinity—where the two men reaffirmed their collaboration.

Meanwhile, the southern part of North Kivu province, where the M23 emerged, was relatively calm. Many Congolese troops had moved north, where they were fighting Islamist rebels, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF, affiliated to the Islamic State in Central Africa). Prior to the M23’s return in November 2021, there was little sign of an imminent threat to Rwanda from either the Congolese government or the FDLR.

A likely explanation for what triggered the escalation lies in Rwanda’s vexed relations with two other neighbors. In mid-2021, Félix Tshisekedi began strengthening ties with Uganda, signing road-building and investment agreements. Then, on November 16, 2021, a trio of suicide bombers blew themselves up in the center of Kampala, the Ugandan capital, killing 4 people and injuring 37. The Ugandan government then deployed several thousand soldiers to the DRC to carry out joint operations against the ADF, held responsible for the attack. This projection of Ugandan military and economic power into the DRC was perceived as a threat by Rwandan security officials.

At the same time, the Burundian government, which also had (and still has) strained relations with Rwanda, deployed its army in the DRC against a Burundian rebel group based on its territory. Rwanda felt surrounded by hostile forces and reacted by deploying between 3,000 and 4,000 troops to the DRC in support of the M23.

Huge Economic Interests at Stake

Security and economic motives are difficult to disentangle. Rwanda, like Uganda and Burundi, profits from instability in the DRC. Even before the M23 crisis, it took advantage of the weakness of the state to project its own economic networks into the Congolese hinterland, supporting networks of smugglers who smuggle large quantities of gold, tin and tungsten into Rwanda. Since 2016, gold smuggled from the DRC has been the main export for each of these three countries – in some years, it has accounted for up to half of their exports.

A similar argument can be made for the persecution of Congolese Tutsis. There is no doubt about it. Yet there was no upsurge in anti-Tutsi sentiment until the reappearance of the M23 in November 2021. Certainly, some 80,000 Congolese Tutsis live in refugee camps in Rwanda, some of them for almost thirty years. And it’s true that anti-Tutsi sentiment is being exploited by Congolese politicians to gain popularity and divert the attention of the Congolese people from their socio-economic failures. But it seems unlikely that this was Rwanda’s main motivation for supporting the M23—in all the meetings between Tshisekedi and Kagame prior to the rebellion’s revival, most recently in mid-2021, there is no public trace of this issue.

Nor do Rwanda’s protests about discrimination affecting Tutsis match the way its government has treated Congolese Tutsi refugees in its own country. For example, in 2018, police opened fire on a crowd of Banyamulenge refugees protesting the reduction of their food rations, killing at least twelve people. The CNDP and M23 have also repeatedly carried out forced recruitment of Tutsi civilians, including children, in camps in Rwanda, which has been documented in several reports (here and here in particular) by UN investigators.

The Dream of “Greater Rwanda”

Rather, it was in response to the M23 rebellion that persecution against the Tutsi community increased, based on the same conspiracist arguments that Onana seeks to lend credibility to and infuse. In November 2023, in the border town of Goma, a crowd lynched a Banyamulenge soldier, accusing him of being an M23 fighter because of his physical features. According to the NGO Human Rights Watch, several Tutsis were killed in similar circumstances, while dozens of people were arrested because of their ethnic identity. Rwanda was able to point the finger at these cases of hatred and extremism, arguing that these were the real sources of the conflict.

Finally, some influential Rwandan figures have justified intervention in the DRC by evoking a “Greater Rwanda” and pointing out that Rwanda has historical claims to parts of eastern DRC dating back to the nineteenth century. There’s a famous precedent: as Rwanda launched its first invasion of Zaire in 1996, then-President Pasteur Bizimungu showed diplomats a map of a Rwanda 50% larger than its current borders, extending into the DRC. Similar maps were shown at itorero, civic education programs held throughout the country during which participants were informed about Rwanda’s supposed pre-colonial golden age. Kagame took up this theme in a speech in 2023, declaring: “As far as the M23 is concerned […], you must know that the borders drawn during the colonial period cut our countries into pieces. A large part of Rwanda was left out, as well as eastern Congo and south-western Uganda. [This is the root of the problem.]

Even if the borders of the past justified military aggression (they don’t), Rwanda’s claim to eastern DRC is tenuous. As historians have pointed out, Rwandan armies only briefly occupied small parts of this region in the nineteenth century, without ever fully controlling them. And while some local chiefs paid tribute to them, they were also often fiercely independent. Unfortunately, these historical accounts also reinforce the idea in the Congo that the Rwandan government wants to establish a “Tutsiland,” a fantasy peddled by Charles Onana and others.

A Seductive Discourse

Despite his many inaccuracies, Onana has touched a nerve. Tired of endless wars and international interventions, many Congolese—judging by the hundreds of thousands who have seen his YouTube videos—seem to agree with this inverted rewriting of the causes of war. If the Congo is in this disastrous situation after twenty-eight years of conflict, it’s because someone wanted it that way, they tell themselves. This logic of “cui bono” (“who benefits from the crime?”) is seductive. The Congo’s suffering has been so colossal that it’s reassuring to think it’s the result of a global conspiracy.

It’s true that when it comes to Rwanda and its repeated interventions, the international community has been complicit. Rwanda is still largely dependent on aid. According to the World Bank, the country received USD $1.25 billion in official development assistance in 2021, representing 74% of central government expenditure. Its “Visit Rwanda” logo appears on the shirts of Arsenal (England), Bayern Munich (Germany) and Paris Saint-Germain (France) soccer clubs. In the midst of the M23 offensive in 2022, world leaders attended the biennial Commonwealth Summit hosted by Kagame. And in 2023, several celebrities—including comedian Kevin Hart, actor Idris Elba and British Foreign Secretary Andrew Mitchell—were guests of honor at the government’s gorilla naming ceremony. While the US, a traditional ally of Kagame’s Rwanda, is increasingly critical of his intervention in the DRC, many other countries continue to subscribe to the Rwandan thesis that he is merely protecting himself and the Tutsi community, or at least look the other way.

But it’s hard to find evidence of the wider conspiracies Onana is trying to sell. Putting aside allegations of Tutsi empires, there’s the more credible question of corporate profiteering. There’s no doubt that many have profited from the Congolese wars, from arms dealers to cynical politicians. But what about the multinationals?

Extractivism and Corruption

When the Mining Code was drafted in 2002, with the support of the World Bank, its rationale was that privatization of mineral resources—all of which were under state control under Mobutu—would lead to greater prosperity. To this end, the code provided generous tax incentives for foreigners to invest in a risky environment. Over the following decade, companies ended up snapping up the most lucrative mining concessions, sometimes under dubious circumstances, with hundreds of millions of dollars disappearing into the pockets of middlemen and crooked politicians.

The Congolese treasury has also benefited: its national budget in 2024 is at least twenty times higher than it was in 2002. And yet, the country remains a place where raw materials are extracted, where added value is low or non-existent, and where large amounts of capital flow to offshore tax havens. But these injustices are linked to the broader organization of the global economy and are not inherent to the DRC.

Mining is capital-intensive and requires political stability and quality infrastructure. So it’s hard to see how the M23 war could have favored international capital. Moreover, this capital is not intrinsically linked to US politics: the DRC’s largest mining company today is Glencore PLC, headquartered in Switzerland and listed on the London and Johannesburg stock exchanges; most of the other major mining companies are Chinese; finally, the most important mining entrepreneur in the post-conflict period is undoubtedly Dan Gertler, an Israeli billionaire who was sanctioned by the US government for corruption in the DRC.

What’s more, almost all of these large-scale mining operations are located far from conflict zones. There, supply chains link the miners to traders and international buying groups based all over the world, who ship the ore abroad for refining. Gold, by far the most valuable product today, is shipped to the United Arab Emirates via Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda. Tin is processed in East and Southeast Asia. Many international players are thus profiting from the chaos in the DRC. However, much of this profit is linked to the systemic injustices of the global economy, rather than a conspiracy to exacerbate the conflict there. The apathy and exploitative nature of the international system, not criminal intent, are probably the main culprits.

Images that Fuel Violence

This wait-and-see attitude brings us back to comparisons between the DRC and other major cataclysms of our time: Gaza, Ukraine, Syria. The DRC crisis occupies a marginal media and diplomatic position compared to these conflicts. This indifference has allowed personal relationships—such as those between certain members of US, French and British institutions and Rwanda’s ruling elite—and the guilt linked to inaction during the 1994 genocide to influence political decisions.

The narratives of some of Kinshasa’s political elites, who sell a single story—that Rwanda is irredentist and imperial, and seeks to profit by waging war on its neighbor—have several harmful consequences: not only can this line of reasoning inflame ethnic stereotypes and persecution, but it also allows the Congolese government to absolve itself of its own failings and transgressions.

In Kigali, a contradictory but in many ways complementary scenario has also taken hold. Rwanda is portrayed as the misunderstood, hapless victim of crusading Western human rights activists and genocidal Congolese officials. Rwanda officially denies its involvement in the DRC, but claims that if it were, it would be as part of a noble struggle to defend itself and protect Congolese Tutsis.

These two mutually reinforcing visions fuel the violence and prevent solutions to the ongoing crisis. There are also, of course, interests at stake: the elites of the DRC and Rwanda profit enormously from the conflict, as do the multinationals. It’s also true that the governments of Europe and the United States have played an important role in exacerbating the crisis. Yet, to resolve these conflicts, we need to look at how these discourses are told and legitimized, and why they appeal to political actors as well as to a wider public in the region and beyond. As long as Kinshasa can blame “evil Rwanda” and Kigali can point the finger at xenophobic militias in the DRC, it will be difficult to find a lasting solution to the conflict.

Photo: Paul Kagame and Félix Tshisekedi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, June 2021. © Paul Kagame / Flickr.